Fish waited for him until five o’clock. Ferd never turned up and when he couldn’t be found at the Grant & Ward office either, Fish set off for Brooklyn in search of him. He wasn’t home. Fish left a note insisting that Ferd come to his flat that evening, then returned to the city to wait.
Ferd was in Prospect Park, taking Ella for a long, quiet carriage ride. It is impossible to know how much or how little Ella knew about what her husband had been doing for the past few years. She was aware that he was often anxious, hypochondriacal, and not always truthful; she had learned all that during their courtship, with its odd stops and starts. But for all his foibles, he had managed to provide her with an extraordinary life: two opulently furnished homes and a grand summer hotel, staffs of servants, a circle of acquaintances that included not only other up-and-coming young couples in Brooklyn and Manhattan and Stamford but celebrated figures, including the ex-president of the United States. And now they had an infant son, less than two months old. Just a week earlier, Ferd had bought for Ella several thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds at Tiffany’s in apparent celebration of the birth of their child, and as an early gift for her thirty-second birthday, now just three days away.
Ferd knew that most of the world he had created for her was about to vanish. How much he told her about what was about to happen or the real reasons for the coming disaster as they drove together beneath the big shade trees no one will ever know.
They got home just after dark. Ferd wrote two more letters and ordered them to be hand-delivered to Fish and Buck Grant. “I will get two hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollars checks tonight if possible,” he assured his older partner, though he had no real prospects of making good on that promise. “Am doing my best to put matters through and make [the] bank easy. I am not leaving a stone unturned.”24
With Buck he was more frank. “I am very much afraid that the end has come,” he wrote, “and that unless something is done tonight everything will be over tomorrow. Now take it cool, old boy, and don’t get excited, but remember that we don’t want our names to go down, and we will fight before it comes.” He listed securities allegedly on hand, adding up to $1,323,700, and urged Buck to return to Mr. Vanderbilt that evening and see if he could get half a million dollars more on the promise of $800,000 or $900,000 worth of them. The check was needed by morning; the securities could be delivered to Vanderbilt the next afternoon.
I am going to start out myself and see several men and may be able to do something—so go right at it, Buck, and remember that if it is not done it will be the end of our business career. This is the last [withdrawal] Mr. Tappan will have to make, but if we don’t pay this $500,000 tonight it will be our last blow. I will be down sometime during the night, for I shall go everywhere, so send me word what you succeed in doing, and if you get a check send it over by a messenger. Mr. Vanderbilt can draw on the Chemical bank if he wants to. We must have the loan for 10 days, anyway, till we can get the bank straight. I am going to several bank men myself and will be home late, so don’t try and find me, but try to get all you can.
This is our last hope, Buck, so do all you can.25
Ferd did not “go everywhere,” as he had promised Buck he would; nor did he track down “several bank men.” Instead of knocking on more doors, he strolled over to the Brooklyn Club, sat quietly in its reading room until it closed, then returned home and got ready for bed. The end had come as he had feared, and he was powerless to do anything about it.
Buck Grant did not return to William Vanderbilt’s home in search of more money, either. But he did remember that Grant & Ward had $50,000 worth of bonds belonging to his father-in-law, Jerome Chaffee. If the firm really was in trouble, he wanted them back. With his wife and Stephen Elkins, who was acting as Chaffee’s counsel, he climbed into a carriage and headed for Brooklyn. Ella greeted them. Ferd wasn’t home yet, she said. She directed the servants to set out wine and slices of cake for them to enjoy while they waited. Ferd entered the room well after midnight. He was sorry, he said, he had been all over New York trying to raise more money for the Marine Bank. Sadly, he’d had no luck. All three men agreed the bank would have to take care of itself. Grant & Ward would ride things out on its own.
But, Elkins said, for the time being at least, he wished to have his client secured and therefore wanted his bonds handed back to him. Ferd said he’d be glad to turn them over, but “I don’t see the need. Senator Chaffee can have his money at any time on demand.”26
Elkins insisted. Very well, then, Ferd said, Chaffee’s bonds were in a strongbox at the office. He’d meet Buck and Elkins there first thing in the morning and hand them over. They could keep them until things calmed down.
It was nearly three o’clock in the morning when the visitors climbed back into their carriage. Young Grant was relieved. But Elkins was troubled: “The whole thing is suspicious,” he said. “Did you observe he had his slippers on? He was in the house all the time. And was afraid to come down and see us.”27
Just as he had most weekday mornings since 1880, James Fish boarded the Wall Street Ferry shortly after six on Tuesday, May 6, and headed for Brooklyn. He had heard nothing from his partner since the scrawled note he’d received the previous evening, and had slept only fitfully in his room above the bank that night. Ella met him at the door. He had to see Ferd at once, he said. She said her husband had been out late and was still asleep. Fish insisted. They argued back and forth for a minute or two. Finally, he pushed past Ella and started up the staircase. By the time he reached the second floor, Ferd’s bedroom was empty—he had taken advantage of the argument to race down the back stairs and out the basement door. The maid he had rushed past said he hadn’t told her where he was going.
Fish put his hat on and went back to Wall Street to face the coming disaster alone.
The directors gathered at the Marine Bank at ten thirty for their regularly scheduled Tuesday meeting. Everything seemed normal, though some at the table thought it odd that neither President Fish nor young Ward was present.
Ferd wasn’t at his office, either. Buck and Stephen Elkins asked George Spencer where he was. He didn’t know—he had stopped by Ward’s house on the way to work, he said, and found Mrs. Ward in tears. Her husband was missing. He’d left a note saying only that the Marine Bank was going to fail today and he would not be home. She feared he might kill himself.
Elkins called for the key to the strongbox. Spencer said Ferd had it. The attorney sent for a hammer and chisel and broke open the box. Most of Senator Chaffee’s bonds were missing.
Meanwhile, Fish had gone to the Clearing House with a bag full of cash and a big bundle of the bank’s securities, hoping somehow to borrow enough money from his fellow bankers to make up for what was now a $900,000 shortfall, due almost entirely to unsupported checks written by Ferd on behalf of Grant & Ward. Fish was “acting like a man dazed with fright,” the Clearing House president remembered.28 The sum he needed was simply too large. The Marine Bank, to which he’d given thirty-one years of his life, would have to suspend operations.
At the bank, the directors’ meeting broke up at eleven o’clock. Ten minutes later, a janitor pulled down the iron shutters and locked the door. A crowd of baffled depositors began to grow outside, eventually closing off both Broadway and Wall Street. Customers banged on the door. Rumors swept the financial district. The bank was wrecked. So was Grant & Ward. “My God,” one man in the stunned crowd said, “if that’s true, I’m ruined.”29 The stock market plunged 3 percent overnight. Within ten days, the survival of two other New York banks would be in question, in each case because of misdeeds by their own corrupt officers.‡
Several major brokerage house and banks in Newark and Pittsburgh and elsewhere collapsed. A brief but unsettling panic followed, caused, said the Commercial & Financial Chronicle, by “a complete loss of confidence … in the stability and soundness of various institutions and firms.”30 No one had done more to undermine that confidence than James D. Fish and Ferdinand W
ard.
At around noon on the day of the crash, General Grant turned up at 2 Wall Street. The crowd of curiosity seekers that now filled the street fell silent and parted so that he could make his way inside. Newspapermen had already stationed themselves in the hall and reception room of Grant & Ward. A young financial reporter named Alexander Noyes never forgot seeing the general arrive:
The outer door slammed open. It admitted General Grant, followed by his Negro servant. Moving rapidly across the room on crutches … the general looked neither to right or left. He made for his partner’s private office, unaware that [he wasn’t] there.… As he moved across the room … he held tightly clutched between his lips a cigar that had gone out. Nobody followed him, or spoke to him but everyone in the cynical “hard-boiled” group took off his hat. It was not so much a tribute of respect to a former Chief Magistrate as spontaneous recognition of the immense personal tragedy which was enacting itself before our eyes.31
Buck was waiting for him behind Ferd’s office door.
“Well, Buck, how is it?” he asked.
Swallowing hard, Buck answered: “Grant & Ward has failed, and Ward has fled. You’d better go home, Father.”32
Without a word, the general turned and slowly stumped his way back out of the office, past the silent reporters, into the elevator that carried him upstairs to his office at the Mexican Southern Railroad. He stayed there, all alone, till five o’clock, when he called for George Spencer, Grant & Ward’s clerk.
Spencer found him slumped behind his desk.
“Spencer,” he murmured, “how is it that man has deceived us all in this way?”
The clerk had no answer.
“I have made it the rule of my life to trust a man long after other people gave him up,” the general continued. “But I don’t see how I can ever trust any human being again.”33
He buried his face in his hands.
When Grant left home that morning he had believed himself a millionaire. When he got home in the evening he had $80 in his pocket. His wife had another $130. There was nothing else.§
Ulysses S. Grant would never come back to Wall Street.
Ferd had fled, just as Buck Grant told his father he had, but he hadn’t gone far. After slipping out of his house to avoid meeting James Fish early that morning he had crossed the East River and taken the train to Stamford. He “felt there would be trouble with the Marine Bank,” he remembered, “and I wanted to avoid the excitement.”34 In fact, he was paralyzed with fear. He spent most of the day holed up in his big house on Strawberry Hill Avenue. “It seemed to me that I was dreaming,” he recalled later, “and sometimes, when I look back at some of the transactions, that I was out of my head.”35
In the late afternoon, he pulled himself together and boarded a train back to the city. All around him, passengers were reading the afternoon papers. The Marine Bank’s collapse and the failure of Grant & Ward dominated the front pages. Ferd feared he might somehow be recognized. As the train slowed in the Manhattan railyards, he jumped off, made his way across the tracks to Second Avenue, rode the elevated railroad to Twenty-third Street, ducked into a livery stable, and ordered a closed carriage to take him across the newly completed Brooklyn Bridge and home to Brooklyn.
When he saw that newspapermen and curiosity seekers filled the sidewalk in front of his house on Pierrepont Street, he asked the driver to take him around the back to Love Lane. He got into the house through the stable without anyone spotting him.
Bill Shepard, the boyhood friend who sometimes served as his attorney, was waiting for him in the parlor. He brought a message from William Warner’s brother-in-law, J. Henry Work: Work wanted to see him right away. Ferd was trembling so badly that Ella administered a double dose of chloral hydrate to calm him down, but since Work was a partner in the law firm that had represented Grant & Ward, as well as an investor in the supposed contracts, Ferd agreed to see him. Work got there around nine thirty. Warner turned up a few minutes later with a stenographer.
It was not a friendly visit. Work was acting now as Warner’s spokesman, not the firm’s lawyer. Warner and the anonymous investors he represented had done spectacularly well in their dealings with Ferd, collecting some $1,255,000 more than they had put in (better than $28 million in modern terms). But they still had obligations totaling $578,000 with the firm, he said, and were unwilling to forgo a cent. Work warned that if Ferd did not turn over to Warner every bit of his property in exchange for those obligations, the shadowy but powerful men whose interests he represented would do everything they could to destroy him. Shaking, panicked, incoherent, Ferd signed over the deeds to his Stamford estate and everything it contained, to his half of the Booth Theatre block, and to sixteen house lots at 121st and Madison Avenue as well. He tried to argue that he had already conveyed his Brooklyn home to his wife, but Work insisted she sign a paper turning it and all its contents over to Warner, regardless.
Thursday was Ella Ward’s birthday. She spent it with three friends at 81 Pierrepont Street packing up the few personal possessions she had brought to her marriage so they could be carried to her family’s home at 37 Monroe Place. It began raining late that afternoon, but a crowd gathered to watch the servants struggle down the stairs with an upright piano and a bedroom set that had been part of Ella’s trousseau. After dark, a closed carriage carried her and her trunks the block and a half to her mother’s house to avoid her neighbors’ stares.
It rained steadily all that night and into the next morning. Seven detectives, assigned by a Supreme Court justice to ensure that Ferd not escape before a warrant for his arrest could be issued, took what shelter they could in doorways and under trees in the cobbled square bounded by Monroe Place and Pierrepont, Clinton, and Clark streets.
Around eight thirty, a fast-moving cab splashed to a stop in front of the Greens’ Monroe Place house. The door flew open. Ferd dashed down the steps, climbed in, and ordered the driver to hurry off again toward the ferry landing. The detectives broke into a run. One jumped onto the back of the cab. Another seized the horse’s bridle. A third pulled open the door. “Mr. Ward,” he said, “you must pardon me, but I’ll have to put one of my men on the box.”36
Over the next few days, as Ferd moved back and forth between his mother-in-law’s home and his lawyers’ offices in Manhattan, a city detective would always be at his elbow.
No documents survive that reveal how Ferd’s parents took the first news of the disaster, but subsequent letters make it clear that they blamed James Fish for most of their son’s troubles. Ferd was weak, not wicked, fatally susceptible to temptation. “Oh, how I tremble lest [Ferd] should have to be tried,” Jane Shaw Ward would tell Sarah. “I cannot tell you my dear child how many hours of heartache I have over the thought of dear Ferdie’s guilt in conniving at any of Mr. Fish’s frauds.”37
The editor of the Livingston Republican expressed the feelings of many of the Wards’ neighbors when they heard what had happened:
Dr. and Mrs. Ward, the father and mother of Ferdinand Ward, receive and are entitled to the heartfelt sympathy of their many friends and of the entire community in Geneseo and vicinity over the great blow which the failure of Grant & Ward has been to them. Dr. Ward has lived here thirty-six years and the greater part of that time he has ministered among the Presbyterian brethren of Geneseo. He has baptized, married and buried them and there is no occasion for rejoicing or mourning where his presence is not looked for, to laugh with those who laugh and weep with those who weep. His gray hairs are respected by rich and poor alike and he is looked on and believed to be a Christian and a gentleman.
The talk on the street generally expresses surprise that the failure had not occurred before, the success of Ward having always been looked on as phenomenal and ephemeral, but the extent of the failure seems to startle people. Ward’s charities in this his home, which have been mainly distributed through his mother, command the feelings of many of the citizens. He has given money and remunerative positions to his f
riends, men of his own age from Geneseo, and he and his family have many friends left here.‖
In Philadelphia, Dr. Brinton was devastated. General Grant, his friend and old commander, had been ruined. Worse, his own brother-in-law was responsible. He talked of resigning from his clubs, even leaving the city. The Brintons did not go out in public for weeks.
In Denver, Will Ward boarded a train for New York, forced once again to try to get his brother out of trouble. After he had done so, he told a reporter, he hoped to bring Ferd and Ella and their baby west with him to start new lives on his alfalfa ranch outside of town.
At first, newspapermen were able to find friends and acquaintances willing to speak well of Ferd: a naval officer who had known him for ten years volunteered that he was a “square, straightforward man”;38 a fellow member of the Brooklyn Club declared him modest, reliable, and “without any bad habits”;39 even Buck Grant initially believed his former partner would somehow set things right.
But on Saturday, the national bank examiner issued his preliminary report. The Marine Bank was hopelessly insolvent. Depositors were owed $5.2 million. The bank’s assets—including cash on hand, properties bought for the bank by Fish, and the bank building itself—added up to just slightly more than half of that. Meanwhile, Julian T. Davies, the lawyer who had once been Buck Grant’s employer and had now been appointed receiver for Grant & Ward, estimated that the firm owed at least $14.5 million to its many creditors and possessed less than $60,000 in assets. Until then, the Brooklyn Eagle reported, “Mr. Ward still retained a few friends on the Street, but now it would be hard to find any person willing to uphold his cause. Never before has such a downfall been witnessed in financial circles.… His most boon companions have deserted him.”40
A Disposition to Be Rich: Ferdinand Ward, the Greatest Swindler of the Gilded Age Page 26